Christine Amsden's Blog: Christine Amsden Author Blog, page 22

Secrets and Lies Print Release!

 

For those who like the feel of a real book in your hands, it’s here! Secrets and Lies, the second book in the Cassie Scot mystery series, is now available with that new-book scene and actual, turnable pages!

And if you haven’t read Cassie Scot: ParaNormal Detective, you can get that too. They make nice Christmas presents, and even fit inside a stocking. (I checked for you.)

 

 

Buy Links:

Secrets and Lies at Amazon

Secrets and Lies at Barnes a nd Noble

Cassie Scot: ParaNormal Detective at Amazon

Cassie Scot: ParaNormal Detective at Barnes and Noble

 

 

The Life Cycle of a Novel: The First Doubt

Ah, and it doesn’t take long, does it? No sooner do words begin to intrude upon the perfection of the blank slate than the first doubt creeps in. Possibility turns to reality, and the reality never truly lives up to the dream. The first doubts are niggling, tearing at my confidence and trying to convince me to give up or turn back too soon. But this isn’t a final draft. This is an exploratory draft. Some sentences will be brilliant, some ideas will be brilliant, and some will need to get cleaned up in revision.

Doubt can drain the will of an author who is not strong enough to fight it. Doubt is inevitable, and to some extent it is true. There is no perfect book, there are only the ones we write.

Yet without doubt, our stories would never evolve past the rough draft.

So no sooner is the first word set to paper, then the first doubt suggests that it wasn’t the best first word. I am in doubt right now. I’ve written three chapters, and they’re no good. Well, maybe a bit from the first. And I did end chapter three well, it will lead nicely into the introduction of the romantic hero. But how will this ever grow from some whim of mine into a real, satisfying book?

Oh words! Have you failed me or have I failed you?

Rereading Shadow of the Hegemon

After reading Ender’s Game and Ender’s Shadow, I couldn’t resist rereading the rest of the Shadow series. I confess I don’t feel the same way about the parallel Ender series. I may get there, but as I mentioned in my recent review of Ender’s Shadow, I just love Bean as a character more than Ender. Which isn’t a knock against Ender so much as an adulation for Bean.

In Shadow of the Hegemon, we follow a few of the battle school graduates as they return to Earth and try to pick up normal lives — but life can never be normal for a genius child trained in the art of warfare and now returned to a planet that, without an alien threat, falls back into old patterns of rivalries and warfare. The first thing that happens is that Bean’s arch-nemesis Achilles arranges to have every member of Ender’s jeesh kidnapped. Well, all but Bean himself, who he does his best to kill. Bean is hard to kill, though. Bean escapes, allies himself with Peter Wiggin (Ender’s older brother who was passed over for battle school despite his intelligence and who has been vying for world domination ever since), and works to get them rescued.

I enjoyed this follow-up novel to Ender’s Shadow in part because I liked Bean’s character so much, but I actually liked some of the supporting characters a lot too. Peter Wiggin becomes something more than Ender’s worst nightmare in this book. That view of Peter was somewhat unfair, and primarily the recollection of a boy who never saw Peter after they were 6 and 10 respectively. Peter isn’t perfect, and he does want power for power’s sake, but there was something about him I found compelling.

This book isn’t quite as good as either Ender’s Game or Ender’s Shadow. It’s not really the same kind of book. It starts something different — the story of the aftermath — and is mired in religion and philosophy I don’t entirely agree with. But it is solid, and it did keep Bean alive in my mind for another book, with the promise of more to come, and I enjoyed the read. I recommend it for readers who enjoyed Ender’s Shadow.

The Life Cycle of a Novel: The First Word

Today, I embarked upon a new novel and I decided to blog about its life cycle — the ups, the downs, the woe-is-mes and the triumphs. Every novel goes through a similar journey, but we usually try to recapture those feelings after the fact. It is so much more real to capture them in the moment. And feelings are at the heart of every new artistic creation.

In the beginning… there was an idea. It came from anywhere. It came from everywhere. It was in me all along and I happened upon it. Well, in this case the idea sprang from another idea. Kaitlin’s Tale is a by-product of Cassie Scot, the hero and heroine both minor characters from that series. I knew years ago that Kaitlin’s story would need its own book, but aside from that vague knowledge I honestly gave it very little thought until last month. So if you want to argue that part one should have happened years ago, you could do that, but if I began evaluating the life cycle of a novel with every odd idea that crossed my mind, I’d have a thousand part one’s and you’d never see a part two. So I begin with the only beginning that counts… the first word.

In case you’re curious, the word is “Jason.” But that’s all you get, especially since I won’t promise that this will still be the first word in the final draft.

There’s something thrilling about filling those first blank pages. It’s like a newborn — so much beauty and raw potential. There’s no such thing as an ugly baby (okay, that’s not entirely true, but to a mother, there’s no such thing as an ugly baby). Likewise, blank pages at the beginning of a novel are beautiful.

Today I am filled with possibility. And it is good.

Rereading Ender’s Shadow

Ender’s Shadow is a companion novel to the better-known Ender’s Game, a parallel story told from the point of view of another character — Bean. I loved Ender’s Game (as you can see in my recent review of that book), but I love this one even more. I give Ender’s Game 5 stars, but I would give this one 6 if I could. I’m not sure why I like this one more than I liked Ender’s Game except that I loved Bean. He’s remarkable and tragic and I just plain love him. Ironic, I suppose, since the novel claims that Bean might have been chosen to fill Ender’s role, except Ender had one quality Bean didn’t have — empathy and charisma. People would die for Ender, but Bean is just a know-it-all. Well, he really is! He has a genetic “defect” that gives him off-the-charts intelligence. It saved his life, and as we find out in this book, it helped Ender to his victory, though Ender never realized.

I recalled Ender’s Game as being a psychological story. In truth, *this* is the psychological story. I think after a decade, I blurred the two stories together in my mind. Both are excellent. Both should be read. They could honestly be read in either order, although I tend to recommend reading them in the order the author wrote them, with this second. But if you liked Ender’s Game at all, don’t stop there! This is just amazing.

The Implicit Promise of Genre

Have you ever read a book or a story in which, halfway through, there’s suddenly a ghost? There you are, reading what you think is a perfectly ordinary, mainstream suspense, mystery, or romance, when suddenly Boo! Out pops a random spirit. You may think this is far-fetched, but I’ve seen it in books written by bestselling authors. And far from the ghosts frightening me, they typically make me cast a book down in disgust.

I love fantasy. You know I love fantasy. I’ve spent the past few years of my life immersed in the genre as I wrote Cassie Scot and her sequels. But loving fantasy does not mean I want to see it everywhere. I want to read a fantasy if, and only if, the implicit promise of the book involves magic or the paranormal.

What’s an implicit promise, you ask? Well, an implicit promise is the promise an author makes during the setup of a story, in which we are given to understand more or less what the story is about. Hero stumbles over dead body, gets accused of the crime, and has to figure out who did it so he won’t go to jail — mystery! Lonely young woman meets handsome young man and sparks (figuratively) fly — romance!  Queen of the fae comes to strike a bargain with our protagonists — fantasy!

Yes, that is a rather pat description. No, I don’t expect everyone’s creativity to fit neatly into a box. Maybe in that mystery a ghost killed the guy. I’m not telling you that if you don’t show us something paranormal in chapter one, you can’t go there, but if you do, it has to be with that implicit promise in mind. Normal guy. Normal world. Normal mystery. You have to give us clues. You have to foreshadow. You have to tell the story in such a way that when the ghost does appear, we may or may not be expecting it, but we can think, “Ohhhh! Now I see where you were going when he kept finding all his stuff had been moved around in an apparently locked room.”

If you do decide you want to do that, know it’s tough, and some people still won’t like it because they’ll feel cheated out of their implicit promise.

But most of all, magic isn’t a solution to every problem. That’s not what it is in true fantasy and it DEFINITELY shouldn’t be what it is in stories that are supposedly (and initially) set in the real world.

Rereading Ender’s Game

After watching the movie, I decided it was time to reread a fondly remembered book that I first read back in college, and have already reread once around the time my son was born eight years ago. This was my third look at Ender’s Game, and I doubt it will be my last. If that doesn’t tell you what I think of the book, then nothing else I have to say will.

YES! You should read the book.

This is the story of Ender (Andrew) Wiggin, a child genius who, at the age of six, is sent to battle school in space in order to learn what he needs to know in order to command a fleet of ships to attacks the Buggers, who first came to earth a century before with devastating results. When I watched the movie, I recalled the book as being very psychological and it was, but actually, not as much as I remembered. More of the psychology was in Ender’s Shadow, which I also plan to reread, and which I recall liking even more than Ender’s Game. But more on that in a few days, after I reread it.

Ender is six at the beginning of the book. He is taken away from his home and his parents and is cut off from contact with them. To toughen him up for command he is constantly isolated by his teachers, who put him through varying degrees of hell to see if he can keep rising to each new challenge. He can and does, but at a terrible personal cost. I won’t ruin the end of this book for those who have not read it, but believe me when I say it is one of the best endings in literature. It was a surprise the first time I read it, but that’s not why it’s so good. It’s so good because it continues to be poignant, even the third time.

Ender is a strange mix of improbable intelligence and innocence. If I were to make one criticism of this books, it’s that I really don’t believe genius children act the way Ender and the other kids at battle school do. It doesn’t quite ring true. But it doesn’t really effect my enjoyment of the story, either. Children have long been misunderstood as being miniature adults, and in the case of genius children it remains tempting to see them that way, even though emotionally they are still children. Besides, there was definitely a sense of innocence here, an innocence that allowed this story to work.

FIVE ENTHUSIASTIC STARS

Title: Ender’s Game

Author: Orson Scott Card

Review of Ender’s Game: The Movie

I’ve known for months that Ender’s Game would come out on November 1st, 2013. Perfect timing, I though. I knew I’d be in St. Louis visiting my parents, and that I’d have free, built-in baby-sitting as a result. (Hey, this is a real problem for some of us!) But four weeks to the day after the release date of the movie, it was showing in almost no theatres. That worried me.

I’ve read Ender’s Game twice. The first time was in college, the second (I think) right around the time I had my son, or about eight years ago. So I knew the book, but it wasn’t fresh in my mind, a combination that I felt would be perfect for enjoying a movie. I wouldn’t be as prone to nit-picking because they did this or that slightly different from the book. Those kinds of reviews frustrate me. I want to know if a movie has stand-alone merit, not if it was “true to the book” (whatever that means). But of course, it is hard to separate the two experiences.

As a movie, I found Ender’s Game to be extremely disappointing. And that was with me going in with low expectations. I mean, the book is a purely psychological story, so how do you put that on the screen? I had my doubts going in.

To give credit where it’s due, the movie makers did a fair job of helping us see what was going on in Ender’s mind. They did this through the use of supporting characters asking Ender pointed questions that he answered more readily than was entirely believable, but still… I understood the difficulty. They also showed us what was going on in Ender’s mind by spending a LOT more time with Colonel Graff and Major Anderson (psychologist), adults who were in the book pulling strings, but who had a lot more screen time in the movie than they had page time in the book. Their commentary on how Ender was progressing and what they planned to do with him next were probably the biggest clues to his psychological state.

So actually, my problem with this movie is NOT that they took a psychological book and tried to make it into an action flick. My problem with this movie is that it was too short. I just looked up the technical speds which claim it was 114 minutes long, but I looked at my watch and that time includes almost 15 minutes of previews and commercials — unless I somehow got to see a shorter version of the movie! The previews ended at 11:45. The movie ended at 1:25. Last I checked, that was 100 minutes, not 114.

Regardless, even eight years after reading the book, I felt like I was skimming it as I watched the movie. Obviously, Ender couldn’t spend 7 years in battle school as he did in the book because of aging problems. Nevertheless, he only had one battle as commander of Dragon Army. One?

There are techniques in film that help us see the passage of time. A fast stream of images, for example, which show a character becoming more and more strained over months of being put through more difficult tasks (which was what was theoretically happening). This movie did not use them, but it needed them desperately. It needed more individual moments, and it needed more …and time passes… and according to my watch, it had at least 20 more minutes to do that before it even his the two-hour mark! There was no reason for this movie to compress so much.

The acting was decent, the graphics were pretty, but I watch a movie for a good audio/visual story. And this could have been. Despite all my doubts going into it, the resulting script had the right tools in place to drive home the point of this book. But it lacked depth. Only by filling in the gaps with things I know from the book can I create a complete picture of what happened here.

This movie did not stand alone. If I had not read the book, I would probably think this was a story about a particularly brilliant leader. But this story was never about how clever Ender was. Heck, Bean was cleverer. (Eluded to in Ender’s Game and stated outright in Ender’s Shadow.) There was lip service given to the idea that Ender was chosen because he was a balance between his too-aggressive brother and his too-peaceful sister (both of whom met the intellectual requirements for battle school), but this dynamic drove the book. In the movie, they said it, but they never made me believe it. Frankly, Ender came across as very violent. There is a scene later in the movie that they changed from the book which I agree they had to change — but only because Ender was supposed to have snapped. And in the movie, he never snapped. So if it had gone off the way it had in the book, it would have just been more evidence of his violent tendencies. (Sorry for being vague — this would be a spoiler if I said it in detail. Those of you who have read/watched hopefully know what I mean.)

The ending to the movie set up sequels more forcefully than I recall the ending to the book having done, but then, it has been eight years. I did read those sequels, but only once, and I barely recall them. Maybe the movies will take the idea and go in a completely different direction, departing from the books entirely. I tend to think they’d be better off if they did. Trying to stick too closely to a book is usually what gets movie into trouble. I’m not sure that’s what happened here, I Just know that I felt like I was watching a boy play a nasty video game.

Top 10 Favorite Fantasy Tropes

A couple of weeks ago I put up a list of the things I’m sick of reading about. Today, perhaps in the spirit of Thanksgiving, I decided to flip that around. I don’t care if they’re tired. I don’t care if they’re cliche. There are a few things I just plain like, and I’ll keep liking those things for a good long while. I’m not saying I will never have my fill, but these things are just plain cool:

10. Everyman — I’m actually seeing less and less of this one in recent years (or maybe I’m looking in the wrong places), but I really enjoy becoming engaged with a fantasy tale from the perspective of someone like me. Or at least, someone who is as awestruck by the magic as I am. It really helps me ease into the story.

9. Shape Shifters — These ARE incredibly popular right now, but that works for me!

8. Attitude and wit — I doubt I’ll ever get sick of clever characters with a wry sense of humor and a certain flair.

7. Swords — They are so much cooler than guns, even if they are a bit less practical.

6. Cats — Anyone ever notice that there are a lot of cats in fantasy novels? Not nearly so many dogs. As someone who has *mostly* overcome a childhood phobia involving dogs but who still just tolerates the beasts, cats will always be my preferred pet.

5. Series — Maybe not the ones that go on and on and on with no end in sight, but honestly, I do like to spend a few books with characters I come to like. I particularly like to do this when the characters grow and change over the course of those books.

4. Fae — So much more interesting than Tinkerbell.

3. Long-lost relatives — Tell me I’m not the only one who has a soft spot for this plot device. (I will make an exception for the specific discovery that the bad guy is your father. Star Wars pretty much killed that one.)

2. Ridiculously good looking men — Sorry ridiculously good looking women, I can’t say the same for you and I don’t care if that’s a double standard. I like what I like.

1. Superpowers — Enough said!

On Reading a Series Out of Order

Series need to be read in order. Or at least, the best ones do. The ones that sweep you away because you’re so completely invested in the characters and what’s happening to them.

Since the second book in my first series recently came out, I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the issue of reading series — in order and out. I’m urging anyone who’ll listen to read mine in order, but it’s not entirely because you can’t basically catch what’s going on if you start with book two. Heck, I can’t expect readers who gobble up a dozen or more books a month to remember everything that happened in book one even if they did read it six months ago!

No, the reason is that when characters grow and change, it matters very much that you read a series in order.

Generally speaking, there are two types of series that don’t need to be read in order:

1. Romances in which each book contains its own HEA. There’s a standard formula for genre romance that involves marrying off something like 4-8 siblings in subsequent volumes. The characters don’t tend to grow or change except during their own romantic interlude and their presence in the other books is more by way of the reader getting to revisit a familiar friend for a few brief moments. If you haven’t already read their story, nothing’s ruined — unless you really haven’t figured out by now that all romance ends with an HEA!

2. Mysteries in which each book contains its own self-contained mystery and in which the detective doesn’t change much from story to story. I don’t read much of these because mystery without a bit of something extra (wizards, aliens, romance) doesn’t usually interest me that much. Yeah, I’ve read a few Agatha Christie books and she’s the master. But IMHO very, very few people can provide the sort of twists and turns that make mystery interesting in isolation. At the very least, a quirky character gives them an edge, and as soon as you bring in a quirky character….

If you haven’t caught on by now then it bears repeating: I’m a character girl! That’s one of the reasons I enjoy series so much, because it’s hard to really get to know a character in a single volume. When people ask me who my favorite characters in fiction are, one of the reasons I think about Harry Dresden is quite simply that I’ve spent over a dozen books with him! We’re really close.

Fantasy is one of my favorite genres BECAUSE of how many series there are, and because of how many opportunities I get to read about characters learning, growing, and changing. You can’t read about any of those things out of order, even if some element of a self-contained plot makes a modicum of sense.

In this day in age, I honestly don’t understand why anyone would read any series out of order, regardless of genre. Fewer people are browsing old bookstores for discounted books any longer; ebooks are becoming the norm rather than the exception. If one click will buy you the first or second book in a series, why would you click on the second?

This does put a lot of pressure on me as an author to make sure my first book is WOW. The whole rest of the series is riding on my ability to start a story. But if that pressure gives me a chance to show you layers and depth, then it’s worth it.

After we put all that work into it, are you really going to mutilate our art by looking at it upside down?